MIMIC

 

MIMIC

Real Name: Calvin Montgomery Rankin

First Appearance: The Uncanny X-Men (Vol. 1) #19, April 1966

Powers: The Mimic is a mutant who manifested his superhuman powers through a chemical accident. He has the ability to rearrange his own physical and genetic structure in order to endow himself with the same intellectual, psionic, or physical abilities of anyone within a 1-mile radius of him.

His power operates by a constant emission of invisible psionic waves that perform a full-spectrum genetic scan on anyone within his power's broadcasting radius. His power then transmits back information that his mind and body incorporate. His power is partly psychomimetic, meaning that he draws on the factual knowledge of others, making him as smart as his teachers in high school. He also adopts pure physical skills, immediately becoming the strongest and most skilled football player on the field.

Chiefly, of course, is his ability to duplicate the superhuman powers of others, be they physical, psionic, or energy-based. The Mimic retains all of these traits for as long as the person(s) remains in his scanning radius, with his mimicked talents quickly fading once he gets out of range of the template. Originally, his power was not subject to his control and could activate whether or not he desired it to.

The Mimic is even capable of duplicating features based on abnormal physiology, such as the Angel’s wings or the Beast’s oversized appendages. He can hold multiple abilities at once. Through long-term exposure combined with certain power enhancements, he has permanently retained the powers of the original X-Men (Professor X, Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Angel, and Marvel Girl).

The Mimic's powers have changed over the years. After having mimicked all the powers of the original X-Men during his brief tenure with the team, he later attempted to mimic the artificially copied powers of the Super-Adaptoid. Instead, the resultant power backlash erased the Mimic's duplicated powers and temporarily disabled his base power as well.

When his mimicry ability returned, it began to grow out of control: He somehow began siphoning energy from people in his radius, making them grow weaker and weaker, and his range was expanding by miles and still growing. To prevent himself from becoming an unwilling mass murderer, the Mimic threw himself on the Hulk and absorbed enough gamma radiation to apparently kill him. Instead of dying, the Mimic's power locked on to Wolverine a few miles away and mutated him into an exact copy of Logan, with both his powers and appearance. Eventually, he cleansed himself of Logan's template and tried to re-establish control over his powers.